At the end of writing a 700-page Irish Food Guide, it is sobering to realise that it has all been leading to one thing: we Irish love a good bacon sandwich on hand-made bread, and a glass of beer to go with it.
Everything – twelve months work, thousands of entries, hundreds of new arrivals, thousands of miles covered, reams of notes parsed and analysed, endless back-and-forth between editors and the office – leads to three main leads: bacon, bread and beer are in the ascendant, and how.
So, give us all a slice of sourdough, some pulled Tamworth pork and a bottle of Galway Hooker, and the world of Irish speciality food is at peace.
But let’s ask another question: alongside all the other good stuff, why are people producing sourdough bread, good free-range pork and craft beers?
The answer is simple: these are health foods, in the most natural, elemental way.
Beer, bread and bacon don’t just show what we want, they also show what we don’t want. And we don’t want Chorleywood bread, pissy industrial beer and tortured pork. Trends amongst consumers – and Irish Food Guide users are the sharpest consumers – reveal deeper truths, and the truth is that we are turning to Irish foods for our health. This is very good news indeed, and it makes a year’s work all worthwhile to realise that a major, profound realisation has dawned on us: we are what we eat.
We hope the 10th edition of The Irish Food Guide makes that eating so, so much better.
